Trump approval rating: How voters feel the president is doing this week

Approval by voting bloc

Here's a closer look at the dips and swings of how voting blocs regard President Trump's work. We've plotted Trump's overall approval rating in white as a point of reference.

42% of American voters approve of the job the president is doing. 55% disapprove.

By Beatrice Jin

02/04/19 05:00AM EDT | Updated 8/21/19 11:00AM EDT

President Trump loves to talk about ratings, from television news shows to sports leagues to the polling of other politicians. He has claimed at times that his own approval ratings are among the highest of any president. The reality is: It depends on whom you ask.

In partnership with pollsters at Morning Consult, we charted how American voters feel about the president’s performance broken down by their demographics. How do voters making less than $50K feel about the president, or women as compared with men?

Let’s look at Trump’s overall rating a different way.

The white line is Trump’s approval rating as a three-week rolling average. Taking a rolling average better measures broad changes in the president’s approval by smoothing out week-to-week fluctuations that can be just noise in the polls.

Make your forecast

Since inauguration

Trends over time

Methodology

Make your own forecast

Part of Trump’s popularity is propped up by his core base: older, working-class, white voters. But how much does each voting bloc tip the scales of his approval rating? If the president sees a dip in his support among Hispanic Americans or a bump among women, how much do those changes cost or improve his overall support?

We built a model to find out. Our forecasting tool measures how influential voting blocs are on the president’s overall base of support.

Here’s how it works: As part of its polling methodology, Morning Consult estimates how large a share of American voters each demographic group represents. We use those estimates to weight each group’s approval of the president and calculate his overall approval rating.

Choose a demographic group:

Adjust any voting group's approval rating to see its effect on the president's overall approval.

Declining approval since inauguration

Most presidents’ approval ratings decline during their administration, including Trump’s. So far, his largest drop has been among .

For a little perspective, we use Gallup approval polls during Barack Obama’s presidency. In his worst poll, Obama had dropped 35 points among Republican voters from a high point at the beginning of his term. (He recovered to a 27-point drop by the time he left office.)

Approval over time

Trump hit his high-water mark among most demographics in the months after his inauguration. Men and older voters are the exception, whose support for Trump peaked later in the president’s term.

Trump has tweeted more than a few times, claiming his popularity among minorities is increasing thanks to good economic numbers. Black voters, though, have registered some of the worst reported support for the president, bottoming out in single digits according to our Morning Consult poll.

● Highest approval ● Lowest approval

Methodology

This page uses weekly data from Morning Consult’s presidential approval poll. A small number of polls had sample sizes that were too small. We excluded these polls from our analysis.

Our forecasting model uses the proportion of the voting population of each voting bloc to weight its change in approval against Trump’s overall approval rating. For example, if Morning Consult estimates that white and black voters make up 73 and 13 percent of the voting population, respectively, then a 7 percent increase in white approval would results in a 7 × 73% ≈ 5 percent change in Trump’s overall approval, while the same change in black approval would result in a 7 × 13% ≈ 1 percent change in Trump’s overall approval.

We’re making our most recent poll data available here.